On Thu, 24 Aug 2023 at 18:43, Michael Grant via mailop <[email protected]>
wrote:

> > (You could also try to reset the password, often sent to the registered
> > email address.)
>
> I have this issue with my gmail account.  I get literally a TON of
> crap for other people who think they have my gmail account.
> Unfortunately putting the mail in spam and telling gmail to block it
> but it does absolutely no good.  Mail continues to come and straight
> into my inbox in many if not most cases.
>

I'm another person who experiences this almost daily. As I'm sometimes
feeling altruistic, I'll at least reach out to the companies - where
there's a means of contact. The most clueful vendors and service providers
have some automated- or semi-automated mechanism for the recipient to
indicate that they were not expecting this email, either a link or a valid
reply-to. It infuriates me when vendors send emails, sometimes with the
hashed from address for bounce detection, but provide no valid reply-to
address or other contact mechanism.

Every ESP which facilitates this sort of bad practice should be forced to
walk over hot coals during their lunchbreak. It also annoys me when this
sort of failure mode isn't anticipated - or accommodated - whenever you
contact a sender or corporation through social media channels, and they
simply have no means to deal with your email address being incorrectly
applied to someone else's account. Prime example: my email address is on
someone else's XBL account and has been for about 8 years now, Microsoft
have flatly refused to remove it. I do so look forward to periodically
receiving their XBL and NBA2K subscription renewals.

I also get the usual list of junkmail, mis-addressed emails, in some cases
valid emails intended for professionals who share a name but omitted their
initial or a trailing number - and thanks to GMail's interpretation of any
version of your username with dots, I get emails to 'first.last' as well as
the 'firstlast' version. Takes a while to explain to people sometimes.

Occasionally if I'm really bored, or it's something important like a debt
being chased, criminal records check, job application reference, flight
check-ins or something professional (medical records, patient discussion
and procedure-related paperwork were commonplace for a while) I'll try to
contact the sender. Other times, I'll have a bit of fun with it... The
depth of profiling of other people you could theoretically do from the
emails I've had over the years can be quite surprising. Some companies
really need an explainer on the Swiss Cheese model, in terms of what
they're willing to blast into the ether cleartext.

Mantra: always provide a valid reply-to method on emails which preferably
directs to a customer service team capable of resolving the problem. It can
sometimes come in very useful.
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